


Eldritch Dealings

by Varjo



Category: Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft, Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Animal Sacrifice, Apologies to Mr. Lovecraft, Conjuring, Contracts, Curses, Dagon is sadistic, Descent into Madness, Don't be racist against a demon, Feline Sacrifice to be exact, Hastur is multilingual, I'm going to end that man's whole career, I'm sorry I cannot write Hastur's accent, Leaning into Mr. Lovecraft's fears, Ligur is a charmer, Resurrection, Rowing, Sea Monsters, Slime, Smoking, Spirits, Teeth, Tentacles, The Necronomicon, Time-Space rifts, character-typical racism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-08
Updated: 2021-02-16
Packaged: 2021-03-14 05:41:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29290767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Varjo/pseuds/Varjo
Summary: “Promising candidate?” she asked, putting a stamp mark onto the flaky form and signing her name quickly so it could be passed on, further processed and filed away. “Good temptation?”“Not a temptation,” Hastur, who had turned to leave with a swish of his coat, answered sloppily over his shoulder. “No’ anymore. Tha’ one? He forfeited his right on bein’ properly tempted the moment he called Ligur [...] a ‘slave’ an’ a ‘lowlife’ an’ an ‘ape’ an’ demanded he leave the inn before he an’ I could do any business together. Tha’ one…” a mischievous grin stole onto Hastur’s features, “… tha’ one I’ll tear limb from limb.”ORThe reason why, in my imagination, Duke Hastur is responsible for the life and times of one Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
Comments: 18
Kudos: 8





	1. In the Filing Room

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Zab43](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zab43/gifts).



> Dear addressee - I thought you might like this, as a little thankyou for how kindly you've reviewed my works up until now. Take care, and have a nice day!

Duke Hastur’s gait was quick and downright lively as he walked in (odd, because usually, nothing about Duke Hastur could be described as ‘lively’); one could almost assume he properly lifted his feet this time. That form of elation and loftiness was unheard-of in Hell and was unheard-of for the Duke – one more reason while the Lord of the Files grew watchful and attentive as she watched him walk up closer.

The grim smirk upon his face made Dagon, who was on duty accepting, seeing through and filing reports and all sorts of other paperwork and giving final tallies to Beelzebub, muse he was planning something.

For now, however, all the Duke did was slap a frayed, musty-smelling piece of parchment onto the already overcrowded tabletop in front of Dagon. “Once on time with your work?” the Lord of the Files asked bitingly upon taking the parchment up. She hadn’t been aware that Hastur had been assigned a certain mortal to tempt – this had to be of his own initiative, which was remarkable on its own. 

Hastur grunted. “Take it or leave it,” he mumbled into his non-existent beard, “but dun’ go an’ give me a hard time over it. I know perfectly well wha’ I’m doin’.”

That, Dagon didn’t doubt, not a single second… Hastur had taken up temptations in the departments of Envy and Wrath, and had received a lot of praise in the past for his work. He was a wonderfully thorough worker; although he never quite met the temptation quota set by the office, the souls he arrived with were always so thoroughly broken and tainted that it would have sufficed for two or three sentences, and earned him a commendation either way. That had only intensified after Lilith, claiming to Beelzebub that her friend Ligur was bored with humanity and his tasks, had made the Lord of the Flies partner both Dukes up. Since then, Dagon imagined, boredom was the least of their concerns. In fact, if her perceptions were right, they had made tempting mortals and causing them pain a competitive sport - not that it hurt Hell in any way.

She picked up the parchment Hastur had brought and checked it superficially; it seemed a proper demonic contract, signed in blood by the client, one ‘Howard Phillips Lovecraft’, and in swampy-smelling slime by Hastur, complete with Sigil, uncrumpled, unstained, uneaten at by bugs or worms or maggots or any other vermin that the Duke surrounded himself with. Not even any knubby toad footprints were to be found on it. Such orderliness made Dagon assume that this was personal, and so…

“Promising candidate?” she asked, putting a stamp mark onto the flaky form and signing her name quickly so it could be passed on, further processed and filed away. “Good temptation?”

“Not a temptation,” Hastur, who had turned to leave with a swish of his coat, answered sloppily over his shoulder. “No’ anymore. Tha’ one? He forfeited his right on bein’ properly tempted the moment he called Ligur a ‘nigger’ an’ a ‘slave’ an’ a ‘lowlife’ an’ an ‘ape’ an’ demanded he leave the inn before he an’ I could do any business together. Tha’ one…” a mischievous grin stole onto Hastur’s features, “… tha’ one I’ll tear limb from limb.”

Dagon thought her ears deceived her. She half lifted out of her chair, staring at the Duke in pointed disbelief. “That prick said… what?” she asked with venomous sharpness, “And why didn’t Ligur snap his head around on his spine immediately?”

Hastur bit his lower lip. His glee in just envisioning what he was going to do to that man was perfectly evident. “That would’ve been kind,” he answered with due disgust for the word alone, “much too kind compared to what he an’ I’ve planned to do to the wanker. He won’t know ‘is face from ‘is arse once we’re done with ‘im.”

Indeed, Ligur also knew what fun was…

“I want in.” Dagon felt ants scurry under her skin as she spoke thus. It sounded promising, the idea of inflicting irreparable harm to an unfortunate human soul in tandem with both Hastur and Ligur. She needed to get away from her desk one of these days either way… “Tell me what I can do.”

Hastur eyed the Lord of the Files from crown to heel; then, he grinned, showing corroded and certainly foul-smelling tooth stumps. “You still can do tha’ half-human, half-amphibian body thing, can you?”

Dagon smirked.

She could.


	2. Upon the River Providence

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, before we begin, I want to apologize for the monster chapter. I contemplated hacking it in half, but I decided against it as I feared it wouldn't do wonders for immersion.
> 
> Also, beware of Ligur using the b-word for his former Archangel. (Yes I do have concepts of who Hastur, Ligur and Dagon were before they fell. Why do you ask?) Apart from that, there's animal cruelty, tentacles and a lot of screeching in here.
> 
> Be warned, and have fun!

“I’m uncertain.”

Of course he was. That was the whole point.

He had been uncertain from the moment Hastur had brought him to the shore, to that dingy, unstable little boat they were going to use to paddle out into the Providence River. As much had been written in his face, but the demon hadn’t given him a moment’s breath to turn back. At first he had tried to hide it behind reasonability – practicability – the knowledge that any island out in the river did not exist, _Sir_ , had never existed and would never exist, but Hastur had glanced at him adamantly and told him either he wanted that secret knowledge, that blessing or inspiration from other worlds to jumpstart his writing career, then he’d seat his thin white arse in the boat, or he didn’t, then he could turn around and leave now and stop wasting the demon’s time.

The man had blanched in the sheen of the lantern he held, but had grit his together and stepped into the boat, shivering as he arranged his slender limbs into sitting position. He put down the cage he had dutifully brought along at his feet, its inhabitant miserably mewing. Hastur had taken to rowing, but also never stopped checking his client’s face for signs of growing fear.

The night was quiet and calm, moonless, and smooth like a mirror’s surface; the air smelled clear and crisp, the river, mirroring back the lamplight, lapped gently and coldly at the boat, swaying it all too slightly. The man’s eyes were huge behind his glasses, and his breath was short, but yet his anguish was at a manageable level. Hastur had the impression that the human was under constant stress to say something – anything, at least – but the words never passed by his pale lips.

Except for when he had said, “I’m uncertain,” one hand clenched around the handle of the lantern, the other one around a pen and notebook he held on his angular knees.

Hastur grunted, pulling the oars close for another mighty stroke. The boat glided through the night, soundlessly as a bat. “O’course you are,” he grumbled. “We’re messin’ with plenty powerful bein’s, too. But as I said, you either wan’ their knowledge or you don’. Yer choice, no’ mine.”

The human sucked his lips between his teeth and turned away, avoiding the glaring of Hastur’s plain black eyes – only to sharply inhale and tense up at something he might have seen to their left. “There!” he whispered, pointing at nothing in particular with a trembling finger, “Did… did you see that?”

Hastur didn’t even look up from his rowing. “See wha’?”

“I’m not sure,” the man answered, voice still hushed and low, still peering into the impenetrable black with squinted eyes. “A… movement, I believe.”

“Well then.” Hastur pulled at the paddles more intently. “They must‘ve noticed us. Better we keep movin’ ‘fore they catch up.”

“They?” the human asked in alarm – but before Hastur even could draw breath to answer, the river began to stir. Or, rather, something living in it began to stir, making the water boil with its hasty strokes, lifting out far enough to reveal a slick, scaly back with a solid, high dorsal fin, a row of collar-like spikes around its neck and shoulders, and at least half of a face with big, immobile eyes, a smooth, hairless head, large, finned ears, a flat, almost invisible nose, and, as it finally was close enough to display those to full effect, a broad-lipped mouth inset with rows upon rows of tiny, needle-sharp teeth.

It hissed in threat, rising out of the waves until it overshadowed the rowing party, and reaching out with a covetous hand.

The human shrieked, faced with the water creature’s sharp-toothed maw.

The cat in its cage hissed and roared.

Hastur lifted one paddle and threatened the creature with it, speaking a low, gurgling, throaty and definitely not earthly language.

The creature gave a shrill cry and its eyes shimmered for a moment, in anger or glee; then it slammed back into the water, winding away from the boat, getting both its passengers wet, and disappeared with rapid swimming strokes toward the black horizon.

The human coughed, retched and spat, gripping his throat. His eyes were torn open. “What… what was that?” His anxiety had audibly heightened.

“Warden.” Duke Hastur’s voice sounded as if he were gargling pebbles. “They’re no’ happy to see us.”

“I… I don’t know if…” The human’s teeth chattered.

Hastur snorted in derision. “I scared tha’ thing off in no time, din’t I?”

“Are there… more of those up front?”

“I got things under control, Mister. You sit back and keep tha’ gob shut, then nothin’ can happen to you.”

The human didn’t make the impression like he was massively soothed, but he sat back again, grappling nervously with his only half-soaked notebook.

Hastur rowed in silence. The thing he had called a ‘warden’ swam circles around them, shark-like, if the ripples of the water and the occasional sight of an amphibian back and fish-like fins were any indication, but while the passenger frequently made throaty, choking sounds and sometimes rubbed at his eyes with the heels of his hands, the rower never paused. He perpetually checked behind him and gave a gratified grunt as the shore of the island slowly came into view. “Gettin’ there,” he addressed his guest, slowing the boat’s progress down somewhat, “get yerself ready for disembarking. Keep good hold of tha’ there lantern, we’ll need it, and get the cat.” The man, shivering and tensed for all it was worth, nodded in anxious agreement and bent to pick up the cage, which’s inhabitant hadn’t stopped to look around in mounting anguish.

Gently the boat rode up onto the shore; the land itself seemed smooth and indifferent under its hull, never even indenting. The island looked a bit as if it had just risen out of the river an hour or two ago, was overgrown with sickly-bluish-green algae and mosses, pale shells and rock-like growths, the occasional dead crab or sad remains of a coral tangled in the plants. Hastur pulled the boat completely ashore as soon as his passenger had stepped out; he watched as his client tested his footing on the slippery ground, but didn’t wait for him to assert himself before proceeding. The tall, skinny man had to pick up a considerable speed to catch up with the demon’s lumbering pace.

The fear in the man’s eyes behind his thin spectacles pleased him.

A cloaked figure stood next to a ragged, almost organic-seeming, though bony grey well as human and demon approached the centre and highest point of the too small, too perfectly even island. Reddish, flaky paint marked eldritch signs around the figure’s feet, and it carried a book with tattered pages open in his broad hands. Though there were frequent gusts of wind, smelling of sweet water, algae and everything that the inhabitants used the river Providence as a dumping ground for, the pages never seemed to flutter.

Hastur and Ligur winked at each other as the latter brushed his hood off and the human stumbled back with a suffocated cry. “Lowlife!” he yelled, pointing an accusing finger at Ligur and drawing back nervously, and Hastur rolled his eyes. “Wretched peddler of criminal…”

“Get a fuckin’ hold of yerself,” Hastur admonished the man, “you want the knowledge, he got the knowledge. No way around 'im if you wanna have anythin’ out of this.”

“You crave the wisdom that went into this tome I’ve penned?” Ligur’s eyes glistened with greedy, fiery malevolence. He affected a vaguely Arabic accent to unnerve the man even more, his fingers tapped the brittle, stinking ink-stained pages of the book in sluggish assertion, and was visibly delighted to see it working. The man squirmed. “I may be willing to share… for a price.”

That seemed to change the mortal’s mind. He lowered his head a little and sounded halfway sobered up, more upright, if still disconcerted and hesitant, as he resumed talking. “I believe…” the human licked his lips, slowly taking poise once again, “… that it is… it is kind of logical, looking at it this way… that the hidden arts would be, would be… practised… by the sinister…”

His voice sounded broken. The man was grappling with himself. 

Good.

“Enough,” Hastur grunted, leaving the human’s side and positioning himself opposite Ligur, “this is the part where you just stand beside’n watch. You got yer eyes peeled? You payin’ attention? Good, because we ain’t goin’ do that twice. Gimme the cat now.”

The human hesitated, his glance slipping back and forth between Hastur’s demanding, half-gloved hand and the quietly hissing and bristling cat in the cage at his feet. It was a sleek, bluish-grey animal with expressive, big eyes; its ears were flat against its head, its breath was unsteady as it pressed itself into the farthest corner from the demons with every muscle and tendon tensed, and its claws and teeth were seemingly ready to dig into anything that came near it.

“Is there no way around…” the man muttered.

Hastur was unperturbed. “As I said, either you wan’ this, then we need a sacrifice,” he grumbled, “be it you or one of these there kitties. Or you don’ want this, an’…”

The man bit his lip, but took a cautious step forward – cautious so as not to slip – and handed over the cage. He muttered something that sounded like, “But be quick about it, will you.”

The cat shrieked and pressed itself to the back of the cage.

Hastur didn’t pay any mind. He opened the door, reached inside – the cat lashed out and bit, then shook its head lividly as its teeth had indeed connected with Hastur’s thumb – and grasped the feline close behind the shoulders. As he lifted it out of its container, tossing that aside, the animal continued mewing, shrieking and hissing, lashing out with all four legs, its hind claws leaving thin, drippingly bleeding slits along the demon’s lower jaw.

Then, everything happened rather fast.

The human got to his senses long enough to at least try rebuking the demon.

Hastur, however, utterly disregarding the cat’s heroic fight, reached out, grabbed its head in his hand and twisted it around.

The feline’s neck broke with a disgusting crack, and it hung limp and lifeless.

The man turned from pale to green and fought back a whimper with clenched lips and a fist over his mouth.

“Much better,” Hastur commented, gratified, and put the cadaver down at his feet.

He had hardly risen as Ligur, whom he had scarcely as much as glanced at, threw him the book; Hastur scrambled to catch it, and as soon as that venture had been successful, his partner clicked his fingers in his general direction. Hastur petrified on the spot; his head rolled back a little on his neck, and his eyes glazed over.

The man gasped and sprang back, ready to run for it, but…

“You stay where you are,” Ligur addressed him imperiously, kneeling to draw the cadaver close. “The Outer Gods do not suffer fickleness. I already called on them; they are watching and listening as we speak, with intent I assume, just waiting for their sacrifice to arrive. Turning tail now could earn you multiple lifetimes of misery and insanity. Now…” he produced an ornate, greenish-growing knife and turned upwards to look at Hastur, “… the incantation, if you please.”

For a precious two or three seconds, nothing happened; seconds in which the man’s panicked glance glided back and forth between Ligur, who put the knife against the cat’s throat, and Hastur, who held onto the leather-bound tome as if to his first-born child. The lantern dangled from the terrified man’s hand with high-pitched and sad creaking noises. Then, the tall sickly one angled his lower arms as to let the book lie flat on them, it flipped itself open to the appropriate page, and Hastur, turning his pure-black eyes to the sky, began to chant in that same throaty, grumbly language he had used to drive the ‘warden’ away. There seemed to be sounds in that language that were bound to twist and contort a human speech apparatus beyond all recognition.

Calmly, as if he did that every day, the kneeling demon started bleeding the cat out. He wasn’t even disturbed as, while Hastur had chanted for two or three minutes, a wail and a huge tentacle issued forth from the well, whipping around searching for nothing in particular, grabbing around Hastur’s legs once, but letting loose rather quick, finding this was not its target.

The human, however, he was very disturbed by that. His eyes rolled wildly in his skull, cold sweat glistened on his face, and was increasingly unable to hold in little shouts and whimpers.

Ligur seized the tentacle as it lunged his way, clutched and tugged violently at it and finally delivered a stab with his dagger; as he let it slide to the ground, it lay eerily still and curled up, dripping thick, viscous, dark blood.

Was that just a hallucination, or had space itself above them started to waver and shimmer, to warp and distort? It was cold around that twist in space, or time, or both; colder than it should be, even in this mid-fall night. The human, all eyes and jaw hanging open, would very soon run out of whiter shades of pale to turn.

There was a rift opening up; a rift to something that was blacker than the earthly night-sky. A black like this had never before been seen; a black that was more than the absence or negation of colour. It was the absence or negation of the _possibility_ of any light, or colour.

And yet there were bright, unfathomable vortices of colour around it…

The human whimpered miserably as the rift spread and garish, bright spots came into view, rapidly spinning; Ligur, however, grinned. They had nearly made it.

Shapes slowly started manifesting out of that pitch-dark nowhere; shapes that defied imagination. Perpetual explosions in colours the human eye was unsuited for perceiving, dust clouds and bulges of fire made physical, made body, ghastly tentacles stretching into the emptiness beyond. Huge, milky, blind eyes, pupil-less and yet staring. Stick-thin extremities with more joints than were strictly necessary, or comprehensible. Sick, jarring movements and perverse dances that made the beholder’s eyes crawl in their sockets, and those sounds…

There was one of the beings that centred their movements around the perpetual explosion that either produced sound out of itself or played some sort of musical instrument, and the noises, however muffled by crossing dimensions, made the human cramp his hands over his ears. Ligur, getting up and backing up from the sacrifice as well as the gate, had to admit he sympathized. Hearing the music of the Outer Gods was always a scratching, rumbling, unpleasant affair. Only Hastur seemed utterly unperturbed.

Something now peeled off that canvas and poured, wound out of it, curving like a snake, slithering and slimy like a slug, scraped itself off the otherworld and stepped into this. The creature that made the human scream a muffled cry into his collar was shaped like an unfortunate cross between a squid, a slug, a scorpion, a lobster and an industrial garbage disposal; its front was dominated by a vortex of sharply toothed and continuously open mouths within mouths, certainly seven or eight of them, perpetually getting smaller until the last one finally closed. Its encrusted, spiky and yet nausea-inducingly soft and slick skin seemed to constantly change colour as the mind tried to comprehend which colour it actually was, made progress and then was pushed back with inane laughter, and it jerked its pseudo-head around as if it wanted to check its surrounding visually despite not having any eyes. Its extremities, tentacles as well as prodding slender crab-legs as well as shears, felt their way across the unfamiliar ground and left a thin, milky-translucent residue of slime.

The human shrieked.

“I welcome you, Lord Nyarlathotep,” murmured Hastur, affecting a bow.

The creature chattered, clicking its rows upon rows of shark teeth, but turned its attention instead of the human or the polite demon to the cat’s gruesomely mangled carcass. The tips of its tentacles prodded and nudged and tested its fur and skin, finding it cold and unresponsive. It chattered again, and then, something turned visible around the cat’s ragged figure; something iridescent, shimmering in all shades of the rainbow, but altogether too fleeting to be either touched or comprehended.

There was a pause of a moment or two – a pause in which the pseudo-head of the creature Hastur had called ‘Lord Nyarlathotep’ turned, scanning everyone, from Hastur to the human and then to his other side, where Ligur stood, smirking. Then, the being turned, twisted in about itself, wound upwards (seriously, would this human ever run out of air to scream?) and took a different shape. It was a vaguely human shape; pretty competent, too, considering that the Outer Gods tended to only contemplate Earth and its inhabitants from afar, with vague indifference, as seen through dreams by those who were more inclined to them, or, in Earth-terms, a little unhinged. A shape like this could have been found on an Egyptian tomb wall; a tall, slender, ebony-skinned man without hair or clothes, the joints a little too sharp, too jagged and rough, the contours a little too edged, everything about him a little too pronounced, too clear, too… chiselled, in some way. He was holding an ominously smoky grey, but unharmed, immaculate, sleekly furred cat in his arms.

Cat and master had one thing in common: both their eyes were blind and pearly and opaque.

Nevertheless, the cat’s eyes found the man who brought it here, locked on him, and it hissed aggressively, its whiskers trembling.

That was enough.

The man’s eyes rolled to face the back of his skull, and he slumped, a boneless sack of flesh, motionless and powerless to the floor.

The lantern clattered to the ground, rolled away and sunk with a soft splashing into the river.

Ligur whooped.

The man-creature cocked its head a little and made a short series of gargling sounds; Hastur, who had dropped his pretence by that moment, replied in kind, and a grin tugged at his mouth corners.

Ligur, shaking his head, passed behind the gash in the dimensions to approach the well; Dagon, having pulled the tentacle back in and made it humanoid arm and hand again, lifted from inside it, wearing a sardonic smile herself, took the hand Ligur gallantly offered and let herself be helped out of the structure. Both neglected the blood clotting at a stab wound close to her elbow; just a flesh wound. Dagon certainly had recovered from much worse. “That was elating,” she commented as if after a particularly savoury meal, her glance resting on the unconscious man with murderous gusto.

“Wouldn’t have been possible without your help,” Ligur pointed out.

A mischievous grin tugged at Dagon’s lips. Ligur still had not let go of her hand. “Oh, you charmer.”

“Being Lilith’s favourite for a time tends to rub off on one…”

Hastur produced a cigarette out of nowhere and ignited it as Nyarlathotep first disposed of the cat’s soul through the rift and afterwards, turning back into his otherworldly mixed countenance, clicking and sucking, rasping teeth and scraping shears, it crawled over to the man, feeling its way ahead, and let its tentacles glide over his body, feeling for shirt, collar, neck, chin and finally his eyes. It almost gently pulled back the man’s lids (his eyes stared blankly at the sky, his whole face was wet with tears and perspiration) and dripped miniscule amounts of translucent slime onto the eyeballs.

“What’s he doing?” Dagon asked, watching with curiosity.

“Establishin’ a link,” Hastur explained, calmly puffing his cigarette and blowing smoke into the otherwise clear night air. “A bit like insertin’ a bug, for spyin’ an’ some such. Just in his brain, no’ in his office or the like. This way, they can observe him, be it in dreams an’ imaginations or outside, wha’ he really sees and hears, and sometimes, they can insert ‘emselves in his dreams. Give 'im their messages to carry out. Drive 'im nice an' crazy. Within twenny years, we shall have 'im.”

“Beelzebub also agreed,” Ligur added, audibly contented, “to let me put a curse on all ink wells and pens he uses, so that his writings have a subtle stink to them that will make no-one willing to accept or publish a single thing he’s written.”

Dagon gave an appreciative lip smack.

“He asked for inspiration,” Hastur grunted. “Never to be able to live off his scribblin’, he din’t.”

“And the best thing? After he dies, that will completely fade away, and he will be famous all around the world.” Ligur chortled; he sounded gleeful. “Imagine that. Unable to do anything during your lifetime, always running around and hungering and suffering and stuff, and after you’re six feet under and can’t glean a blessed thing, you rise to idoldom.”

Dagon chuckled. That sounded viable indeed.

Nyarlathotep finally left its unconscious victim behind and crawled-lumbered-slithered back towards Hastur and the rift. The demon bowed again and addressed the Outer God with the usual rumbling words; after it had produced a (scraping, grating, clicking) reply, incomprehensible to Dagon’s as well as Ligur’s ears, Hastur hunkered down, pulled his cigarette from his lips and turned it to put it to Nyarlathotep’s inner mouths.

The Outer God was almost careful as it closed its innermost, oh, two or three mouths, fleshy gums as well as teeth, around the butt of the smoke and pulled.

Hastur grinned as his guest and possibly contractual partner was shaken by a moderate coughing fit, spitting out puffs of smoke; his next sentence in the foreign tongue sounded thoroughly amused.

Nyarlathotep clicked and fizzed and bumbled something in return, but scurryingly made back through the rift without much further ado; it seemed the Outer God had, for the first, seen and experienced enough of this godforsaken place. While Hastur, still puffing on his cancer stick and grinning, showing decayed teeth, watched the Lord go, Ligur started trampling a certain rhythm onto the floor.

The gash quickly closed up. Hastur breathed deep and walked over to the human to throw him over his shoulder, holding the cigarette in one hand and the almost forgotten book under the other arm. “You’ll be a‘right?” he asked Ligur and Dagon, who, in bracing themselves, had leant heavily against each other.

“Right as rain,” the fellow Duke answered while the island beneath their feet came to a sluggish, snaky kind of life. “You go and bring him home. Can’t wait to see what life will do to him.”

Hastur scowled; then he disappeared with a smouldering puff of air.

Dagon and Ligur slowly reprised their footing on the calmly meandering landmass they were standing upon; as it touched the shore, Dagon went out of her way to pick up the feline carcass, still lying there and already drawing flies, before she stepped off, following Ligur, but this time declining to take his hand. Her concentration was directed toward the river where a head now lifted out of the waves; a head, certainly thrice as big as her whole body, scaly and greenish-mud-coloured, smooth and crowned by a pair of horns, curved inward. The comparatively small and round eyes in that sharp head shape had an almost tender air to them, glassy and ocean-wide, and the high-pitched, screeching sound it emitted upon laying eyes on Dagon sounded almost doting.

Almost.

“Thank you, Leviathan,” Dagon called up to the sea monster and threw her the corpse, which was caught up and devoured within the moment, “I promise I will bring your cause before Beelzebub as soon as I can. You shall get a nice big area, maybe an entire ocean, all to yourself.”

Leviathan screeched her approval, leaning down so Dagon could hug her snout, which she happily did. Then the serpent sank below the waves, turning to search more open waters, more befitting of her rather large size, and the Lord of the Files turned back toward Ligur with a cool, yet sharp and threatening, “You tell anyone you saw that and you’re next on her meal plan.”

Ligur smirked. “Wouldn’t dream of it. Still, in all silence… what’s that between the both of you?”

“Leviathan’s like a big sister to me,” Dagon explained, her voice unwavering, “what with her being the embodiment of the sea. I wish I had more time to swim with her, destroy ships and scare humans… but as it is…” She gestured dismissively.

Ligur nodded in understanding. “You got to do what you got to do.”

“Yeah.” Dagon sniffled. “About Hastur, though. Were you aware that he could do all these… languages? He never really seemed much the talker to me.”

“Been a diplomat before,” Hastur’s voice suddenly rasped behind them, and Dagon jumped in whirling around to him while Ligur just grinned. Hastur stood there as if he had never been away, one hand in his coat’s pocket, the other perpetually fishing for the coffin nail he balanced on his lower lip. “Wanted me to keep things smooth wi’ those outer-dimensional bein’s… din’t turn out so well for ‘em, in the end.” The tall, thin, and sickly demon chortled while taking the last puff of his cigarette and casually, carelessly flicking the butt to nowhere in particular.

Littering was an offense too, after all.

“At least you got to work with Beelzebub from the start.” Ligur screwed up his nose in evidently disagreeable memories. “I had to contend with being under that bitch Uriel’s command.”

Dagon snorted. “I beat you both,” she said, “I was in Michael’s troops, training opposite Uriel. You don’t want to know what that was like…”

Hastur grunted in appreciation; Ligur shrugged non-committally.

“You left the book with him, I see?” Ligur was audibly fishing for something to change the topic to.

Hastur followed, however. He didn’t sound markedly interested, but darkly content all the same. “Did. Will freak him right out if he’s home in his bed an’ wakes up an’ it’s there. At the moment it’s just writin’ tha’ he can decipher but nobody else. We could make use of tha’ in the future I guess… change the stuff it says ever so slightly, or put in more sinister stuff…”

“Just call me up if you’re ever doing more in that regard,” Dagon chimed in, and Ligur edged ever so slightly closer to her. “I’m kind of invested in this now.”

Hastur’s lip twisting and grunting might or might not have meant ‘will do’; he, smelling like a chimney, stood close behind the other demon’s backs. Ligur and Dagon now almost touched shoulders. “Any reason why we’re still standin’ around here?”

“None,” Ligur answered. “Apart from this being a rather enjoyable, clear night.”

Dagon merely laughed uproariously.

This time, Hastur’s snarl was tainted with amusement. “You’n old sap, tha’s wha’ you are.”

Ligur’s eyes glistened as he turned to his fellow demons and answered, “Only after a curse-placing gone perfect… with the two best accomplices I could imagine.”

As Dagon told him to shut up, it sounded playful and more than a little flattered.

As Hastur told him to shut up, it sounded raspy and rough, but with a touch of underlying camaraderie.

So he did.


End file.
